Radia Chowdhury

3 November 2015

Midterm (Analysis of passage in Corrections)

One of the most important things for a reader is to understand- or just get a feel

of- the mind of the narrator. One of the literary devices Bernhard uses is repetition-

repetition where it is not really necessary. But it has its effects in helping the reader get a

sense of the narrator’s mind- his recurrence of thought, of what is important to him. In

these passages, the narrator is speaking through Roithamer, as evidenced by the

interruptions of ‘So Roithamers’ throughout the passages to remind the reader. The

narrator says (through Roithamer), “I can’t ask her, she can’t answer. But would it be any

different now, if I could ask her, and she could answer?” The reiteration lets us know that

the state of the Eferding woman, her ability to hear and answer the narrator, is important

to him. The latter sentence sets almost a hint of wistfulness, the way a person in

mourning might repeat something to himself in order to come to terms with it. The

narrator tells us that “We don’t ask those we love, just as we don’t ask the ones we hate”

(motioning to that fact that he did indeed love the Eferding woman), presumably because

the ones we love and the ones we hate have their own biases against us and thus, cannot

always answer our questions with utmost honesty- a fact that Roithamer seemed to be

aware of, and the author places this self-awareness here to assure us that this is a man

who still has a sense of the world, that he is not so consumed by his obsessions to forget

the ways in which people work.  I DO ACKNOWLEDGE THE ALLUSIONS TO THIS

THEMATIC MATERIAL AS YOU RECOUNT IT BUT LANGUAGE WISE IT IS SO

MUCH MORE.

The lack of punctuation such as commas (after Actually) and questions marks

(after ‘what if it was all quite different’) serve to remind us that the author is more

interested in expressing the mind of his character and letting the readers flounder WHAT

MAKES YOU THINK HE IS AGAINST THE READER? through his thoughts and draw

meaning for themselves than arranging all of the narrator’s thoughts neatly with perfect

grammar to make it easier. HIS CONSTRUCT IS ONE THAT EXPRESSES

METHODOLOGY AND THAT SHOWING OF SUCH IS THE ONLY MEANING The

passages read like how the narrator think, exactly, in his head, like a loop. AWKWARD

SENTENCE There is a constant refrain of correcting, then correcting the corrections,

then correcting the results of those corrections (in a way, the repetitions that occur time

and again can be seen as the narrator self-correcting himself).BUT HOW DOES HE DO

THIS>  THAT IS THE CONCERN. But he generalizes this apparent obsession, and what

was seen as an extremity of sorts now becomes a realization that it is not an obsession but

a commonality. The shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ allows is vague at first, but it becomes clear

when he mentions “the others”, that he is not talking universally but creating a gap

between different kinds of people with different kinds of corrections. The italicizations

serve different purposes for ‘the ultimate correction’ it serves to tell us that this is a

personal concept to the narrator. The later italicizations of the words ‘really’ and

‘surprise’ underline the narrator’s state of not-knowing, his disbelief at the course of

events that transpired in his family.

‘The inclination to suicide as a character trait as in the character of my cousin who finally

threw himself into that rock cleft’ follows no grammatical rules and is an abstract sort of

sentence, an apt introduction to the passage which deals with suicide, an abstract sort of

concept to most people. The narrator tells us right away the terrible end of his cousin’s

life ‘who finally threw himself into that rock cleft’. The ‘finally’ gives an ominous sense,

almost like the narrator had been waiting for it to happen, like he knew something about

the cousin that others didn’t, that the others failed to see. This part of the passage almost

begins and continues as a story, the cousin’s story, then interjected with his father’s- both

who had misled others by talking and dissecting the idea of suicide so much that no one

believed they would do anything close to it- much like Roithamer himself. The

italicization of the sentence ‘having the clarification in his head and being constantly

capable of analyzing the clarification, he simply can’t commit suicide anymore’ makes it

seem ironic, (points to the fact --GOOD)of this irony. The thoughts are all at once getting

faster and at the same time more clear-   CLEARER the author is using negation to

contradict that negation- ‘GOOD  --THAT IS THE POINT  must basically always be

repellent to him, he simply couldn’t do it’ while all the time the reader has in mind that

he did do it.  The entire paragraph is a long run-on sentence with a sense of urgency, like

the author is pointing out something blatantly obvious that everyone had missed, that

being of course (evidenced by the more regular interruptions of ‘So Roithamer’) to

remind the reader that this is Roithamer himself caught in the loop of talking about

suicide with the utmost sensibility of a man destined for anything but, who had ultimately
fallen prey to this ultimate self-correction.   AS YOUR PAPER PROGRESSED YOU

GOT MUCH MORE INVOLVED WITH THE"HOW" OF HIS DISCOURSE.  "B+"